Elon Musk's midterm election bets failed

🗞️ Story file #1386

Elon Musk's midterm election bets failed

Nov 4, 9 AM ET to Nov 5, 10 AM ET · 2 outlets not rated for lean

29outlets carried it
🫏14 · 8 · 5🐘left · center · right
1 dayon the front pages
28front pages at once, at its peak
5 minof TV captions
6radio newscasts
3 of 3parts of a saga

📰 read it at: Raw Story Rolling Stone The Daily Beast The Daily Kos The Guardian The New Republic Business Insider CNBC Los Angeles Times Mediaite NBC News New York Times The Washington Post Yahoo News BBC Bloomberg Chicago Tribune Forbes MarketWatch Newsweek Reuters The Hill The Washington Times New York Post Newsmax The Daily Signal The National Desk Crooks and Liars The Washington Sun

👣 How this story traveled: from the front pages that broke it, out through TV, radio and the shows, into what people retold and what fact-checkers examined, and on into the saga it is part of. Everything here is matched to the story by our tools, so a link can be wrong; the trackers' pages say how each is made.

Nov 4, 9 AM ETfirst on a front page: Raw Story
Nov 4, 9 AM ETfirst on TV: Fox News
Nov 4, 10 AM ETfirst on the radio: NPR News Now
Nov 5, 7 AM ETpeak: on 28 front pages

the front pages that ran it, hour by hour

Front pages carrying it at each hourly run, Nov 4, 9 AM to Nov 5, 10 AM ET (peak 28), by the outlets' lean: left · center · right · not rated

Who carried it and when: each outlet in the order it picked the story up, a bar for each headline from when we first saw it on the front page to when we last did, in the outlet's lean color (dashed: not rated); a dot marks a new headline, and a headline swapped for a new one between our hourly looks runs on to it. A gap means a look found the story gone from that front page. Beneath, its captions on TV, the radio newscasts that carried it (bigger: the lead) and when people were found retelling it. Hover for details.

📡 Wire copy

1 outlet ran the Reuters headline nearly word for word

The Daily Signal

💬 Quoted

“election interference”1
“election interfering space lasers”1
“My election-interfering space lasers didn't work”1

phrases its headlines put in quotation marks; the bar is how many outlets did

📌 Linked by aggregators

1 Google News

aggregators linking to it from their front page (they don't count as outlets covering it)

✏️ 11 outlets ran more than one headline on it (reworded, or a follow-up)

Bloomberg (2 wordings): “Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX Slide as Democrats Sweep Congress” → “Midterms Spending Binge by Musk, Crypto and AI Hit Voter Wall”
Business Insider (3 wordings): “The midterm races to watch if you care about money, Musk, and the AI boom” → “Tesla and SpaceX shares drop after Elon Musk's election bet backfires”
CNBC (4 wordings): “Elon Musk’s record election bet backfired. The backlash may reach beyond one billionaire” → “Musk’s election bet backfired. The backlash may reach beyond one billionaire”
Mediaite (2 wordings): “Elon Musk’s Companies Take a Beating as Dems Surge on Election Night” → “Elon Musk’s Got Jokes After Dropping Boatloads of Cash to Failed GOP Candidates”
New York Times (3 wordings): “Musk Faces Setback as SpaceX and Tesla Stocks Tumble on Midterm Election Results” → “$400 Million Lost. SpaceX Stock Tanking. Elon Musk Had a Tough Election Night.”
Newsmax (2 wordings): “Musk Jokes About GOP Losses After $500 Million Spending” → “Musk Jokes About Losses After Massive Spending”
Reuters (3 wordings): “Elon Musk's business empire braces for Democratic wave as Texas flips blue” → “Musk has little to show for his record spending on Republican campaigns in US midterms”
The Daily Beast (2 wordings): “Elon Musk Humiliated as $500M Midterm Gamble Backfires” → “Humiliated Musk Scrubs Posts After Burning $500M on Midterms”
The Daily Signal (2 wordings): “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Braces for Democratic Wave as Texas Flips Blue” → “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Braces for Democrat Wave as Texas Flips Blue”
The Guardian (2 wordings): “Elon Musk’s nearly half a billion dollars in midterms spending was a flop” → “Was Elon Musk the US midterms' biggest loser?”
The New Republic (2 wordings): “Elon Musk Spirals Over His Failure to Buy Elections” → “Elon Musk Scrubs Posts as He Crashes Out Over GOP Election Disaster”